a16z Crypto: What Do We See Behind the $2.2 Billion New Fund

Writing by: Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, Eddy Lazzarin

Original title: “We raised a $2.2B crypto fund”

Translation: ChainCatcher

Cryptocurrency cycles often follow a certain pattern

Speculative waves bring attention and capital. Some of it is wasted, while the rest funds infrastructure that wouldn’t have been built otherwise. After the noise subsides, what remains is often more useful than at the peak and more enduring than at the bottom.

If you focus not just on prices, but on what is actually built during each cycle and what people continue to use after the hype fades, you will see this. We are currently in such a relatively calm moment. And the signals coming now are among the most encouraging in years.

The clearest evidence comes from stablecoins

Trading volume fluctuates with market ups and downs, but stablecoin usage continues to rise even during downturns. People use them for savings, cross-border remittances, and payments, often exposing the slow, costly, and unreliable nature of traditional alternatives. The growth of stablecoins appears less like speculation and more like network adoption: the compound growth in usage is because this technology is useful, not because people are betting on price movements.

Blockchain is also proving its value in capital markets

Since the last cycle, we have seen meaningful growth in perpetual futures for price discovery, prediction markets revealing real information, and on-chain lending in the stablecoin credit market. Traditional assets are starting to be tokenized, and on-chain finance is expanding beyond network tokens to other assets. A new financial system is taking shape—one that can operate continuously, settle almost instantly, cost nearly nothing, and is accessible to anyone with internet access.

Regulatory developments are also moving in a positive direction. The GENIUS Act exemplifies prudent policy: clear definitions, strong safeguards, and room for builders to innovate. We expect other areas of the crypto market to also see more regulatory progress through legislation and rulemaking. This will protect consumers, provide certainty for builders, and create pathways for mainstream institutions to participate.

Now is a particularly good time to step back and consider why this moment is especially important.

Software is becoming increasingly complex and harder to trust. AI systems are powerful but largely opaque. The infrastructure that the internet relies on is more centralized than ever. Against this backdrop, the properties designed into crypto networks become even more critical, not less:

• Transparent and verifiable systems
• Globally accessible networks from day one
• Economic models aligned for users, creators, developers, and operators
• Infrastructure that does not depend on a few middlemen

These properties are being realized in actual products: payments, financial services, creator platforms, decentralized infrastructure, and new ways for humans and machines to coordinate. Most of these are built by startups and are increasingly adopted by financial institutions, tech companies, and others to deliver faster, cheaper, and more reliable services.

Practically, this means enabling instant global remittances, removing reliance on banks for holding dollars, tokenizing assets for frictionless transfer, connecting to composable networks others can build on, and embedding these capabilities into various applications. It also includes new modes that were previously impossible: users owning their assets and identities directly, holding inviolable digital property rights; software agent clusters making decisions, executing actions, and completing transactions on behalf of users, on demand; increasingly autonomous networks that can finance, govern, and evolve themselves through code.

This is why we are announcing the launch of the new Crypto Fund 5. This $2.2 billion fund is designed specifically for this moment. Through this fund, we support founders working on the less visible parts of the cycle but which we believe will generate more long-term value: transforming new infrastructure into products used daily by people.

Every major computing platform ultimately becomes meaningful through this process; the same will be true for crypto technology.